I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  “Were Grandma and Grandpa Carson mad at you?”

  “No, but Louisa’s leaving probably hurt them more than anybody besides you.”

  “It didn’t hurt me,” I reminded him stubbornly.

  Dad ran his hands over my hair, smoothing it once more. He gently uncrossed my stiff arms as he spoke. “Okay, then it hurt them most. Just like it would hurt me more than anything if you went away and I never heard from you again. But older people deal with their hurt differently than younger people. Their generation was taught not to let it show so much. I think they’ve avoided Carlisle and you and me because we would remind them of Louisa and make them sad. But like I told you when your grandpa called, your grandma’s sick, and she’s been asking to see you.”

  He stood up, grabbing his travel mug and keys with one hand and taking my hand with the other.

  Six hours later, as we arrived in front of my grandparents’ house, I understood why he’d made me dress up. Our house was big, but their house was huge. The lawn manicured and the outside perfectly painted, their house seemed a work of art, not friendly and worn-in like ours. The backyard was a sprawling garden that, I found out later, my grandmother still attempted to care for despite her weakened state from aggressive treatment for breast cancer. For the first time I could remember, I felt intimidated. I hung cautiously behind my father, stepping very carefully in shoes that pinched, unlike my ratty old sneakers.

  My grandfather answered the door. He stood a few inches shorter than my lanky dad, but he was the kind of man whose presence took over the room. He’d fought in World War II, and even though he’d gone into medicine afterward and became, as people in Carlisle deemed him, “the friendliest doctor around,” his body posture and face still bore that military trademark.

  He shook Dad’s hand, saying gruffly, “Michael,” and then gazed down at me, uncertainty flashing in his blue eyes. “Emily,” he said, and an awkward moment passed before he decided to bend down and hug me. I expected his embrace to be like his handshake, stiff and swift, but he lost some of his well-drilled composure, falling across me like a heavy, wet blanket. I patted his back lightly. I always shied away from anyone’s touch, unless it was my father or a member of Regan’s family.

  My grandfather immediately regained his poise, calling, “Elizabeth, your granddaughter is here. Do you want me to send her in?”

  Though we were there to see her, I only have a few clear memories of my grandmother, and the first was my initial sight of her. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Everything seemed so formal, me being “sent in” like I was visiting royalty. And would her face be all sunken, like kids with leukemia on TV? Would she be bald? He was giving her adequate time to put her wig on by announcing us, right?

  I became abnormally shy again, gripping my dad’s hand and half hiding behind him as my grandfather led us down a narrow hallway with perfectly polished wood floors. Once we got to the living room, I inhaled the air carefully, certain it would have that sick, sterile hospital smell, but it was just stale. The curtains were drawn, making it so dark I couldn’t tell the color of the walls. A large TV sat to our right as we entered. A soap opera was on, and I watched the big green bars on the screen get thinner as my grandmother reduced the volume.

  I didn’t want to glance to my left, where I knew she lay on the couch. I had a feeling that she would resemble my mental image of my mother, except shriveled and wasting away, a vision I knew would cause nightmares. Instead, I stared straight ahead at the fireplace. Ceramic figurines and framed photographs lined the mantel. I was dying to examine the pictures, certain that there’d be some of Louisa among them. Dad only had photos from the time he was with her. I wanted to see her as a child, desperate to know how alike we really looked. When I finally got to peruse them later, I was disappointed to find only pictures of me and of my grandparents through the years—their daughter conspicuously missing from all of them.

  “Emily,” I heard my grandmother say before I looked at her. Her tone convinced me to wager a glimpse in her direction. It wasn’t the raspy voice of an invalid, more of a hopeful, almost youthful sigh. She sat propped up against numerous pillows on the couch, covered in a rose-colored blanket.

  “Grandma,” I responded, feeling my father nudge me gently toward her.

  She laughed musically. “I still feel too young to be called that. Come here and give me a hug. I haven’t seen you since you were a baby.”

  I trudged tentatively over to her. She didn’t look like an old lady, really, and especially not a sick old lady. The light wrinkles, laugh lines around her mouth and eyes, were all that gave away her age; her sun-starved skin and slow movements all that shed light upon her illness. Her hair—which must have been a wig, but I could hardly tell—was as dark as mine, but streaked with a dignified gray and worn in a short bob. Her smile, which widened as I approached, was exactly as I had pictured Louisa’s to be, and her glittering jade eyes mirrored both mine and my mother’s.

  I sat down carefully beside her, and she embraced me tightly. As we pulled apart, tears streaked her cheeks. “She looks so much like her mother, doesn’t she, Robert?”

  My dad smiled at this, but my grandfather’s face faltered, and he looked away.

  My grandfather acted incredibly stiff and formal around me that day. It seemed especially pronounced compared to the way my grandmother doted on me, asking me questions about everything. Not until that evening, when she finally felt well enough to show Dad and me her garden, did my grandfather finally crack a smile.

  My grandparents’ backyard was vast. At the bottom of their deck, lush green grass bled into aisle upon aisle of electrically bright flowers. A stone path wove between the sections of different plants. I followed my grandmother, who was wrapped in a large winter coat despite the mild spring temperature, toward her roses. There was grace in her step, though she walked rather slowly.

  Unable to mimic her elegance, I tripped over one of the stepping-stones, landing on my knees. Dad held out his hand to help me up, but I batted it away, cheeks burning, and sprung to my feet. A streak of dirt ran up each of my shins, standing out horrifically against the whiteness of my tights. The bottom of my dress was grass-stained. Embarrassed and expecting my father to be mad at me for ruining my clothes, I lashed out before anyone could say anything. “I told you I hated these dumb shoes! They made me slip! I told you I hated this whole damn outfit!”

  Dad looked as if he was about to laugh until I swore, to which he responded with a hissed “Emily!”

  But my grandparents chuckled, my grandfather especially. “I was starting to wonder if she really was Louisa’s daughter, prim as you had her looking, Michael. You brought her some clothes she likes, I hope.” All traces of military firmness vanished, his face more resembling the kindly small-town doctor he once was.

  I nodded frantically. Grandpa ruffled my hair the same way my father always did and said, “Go inside and change, kid. You’ll have more fun out here with your grandma if you can get dirty.”

  After that, the trip was a blast, and I came back overjoyed, telling Regan and Marissa that I had a real family with grandparents just like theirs. But it all ended in the fall of 1986 when we took our second trip to St. Louis, this time for my grandmother’s memorial service.

  We brought her ashes to a tree in the Missouri Botanical Garden that my grandfather had had dedicated to her. It was in a beautiful spot that she would have loved, right outside the Japanese Garden. We had a private service, just me, my dad, and my grandpa on a foggy October morning. The leaves had begun to change, including the ones on my grandma’s tree, which were bright gold and orange. That’s what I noticed the most, the slices of color coming through the gray.

  The pastor of my grandparents’ church said a prayer when we first arrived, but after he left we stood in front of the tree for what felt like hours. Watching my grandfather cry was one of the worst experiences of my life. He still had to act so tough; he couldn’t sob like he obviously needed to. Tears
leaked out of his eyes, and he scrubbed at them with his handkerchief and loudly blew his nose.

  Uncomfortable, I studied the bridge into the Japanese Garden. The fog prevented me from seeing to the other side, and I became convinced that my mother would stroll over it at any moment, like she did in my dream. She had to know her mother was gone and feel drawn to say good-bye.

  My grandfather glared at the tree. “She was supposed to outlive me, you know. That’s why you marry a woman ten years younger than you,” he said, his offbeat sense of humor trickling through his sorrow. Then he murmured, “Elizabeth, Louisa … an old man’s got nothing left.” I noticed he stared at the bridge, too, as if he was begging both of them to walk over it.

  Dad took a few steps toward him. “You’ve got us, Robert. You’re welcome to stay …”

  “Bah!” He cut his hand through the air, dramatically dismissing the idea. “What did you say when we offered that after you lost your wife?”

  “Louisa’s not dead!” I interrupted heatedly.

  My grandfather’s eyes got glassy, and he started to say something that was probably along the lines of “She’s dead to me,” but instead he stopped, gazing at me sympathetically. He knelt down in front of me, hugging me while he asked my father, “What got you through that, Michael? What got you through losing Louisa?”

  Enveloped in my grandpa’s arms, I couldn’t see anything but the bulky, tan material of his coat and the white trunk of my grandmother’s tree. I wanted to see my father’s face because he sounded near tears when he said, “My little girl.”

  “My little girl,” my grandfather repeated. “That’s all that can get me through this, too. I need to find my little girl.”

  “She doesn’t want to be found!” I insisted, recoiling from him.

  My last memory of my grandfather was his solid, square jaw, and the determined expression on his face when he said, “That’s too goddamn bad.”

  After that, he roamed the country, searching for Louisa, never stopping in Carlisle to visit. He sent updates describing the beauty of Boston Harbor, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Cascades in Oregon, but returned to St. Louis my senior year, alone. I told myself that I would book a show down there as an excuse to see him. And living in Chicago, I’d be even closer.

  We spent three days in Chicago following our first gig. Tom and Regan started apartment hunting that very night. They circled a bunch of two-bedrooms in the back of the newspaper that contained Johnny’s review of us, but when they showed them to me, I said, “Did you see the rent? You’ve been dating three years, why can’t you share a bedroom? You know we’re going to have to rent rehearsal space, too. I don’t know how—”

  “Emily!” Regan interrupted. “The three of us would split the rent.”

  I furrowed my brow, momentarily confused, and when I got it, I wrinkled my nose. “Oh! I can’t live with you guys. That would be way too weird.”

  Regan’s hazel eyes lost their gleam and her voice fell flat. “But I always thought we’d live together when we left Carlisle.”

  Of course I’d always pictured it that way, too, but ever since that time I walked in on them … I knew they needed their space. Besides, I had a bunch of doubts about moving to Chicago. Part of me hoped that if I told Regan we couldn’t live together, she’d say we couldn’t move. But instead she debated with me about it for a while and then started circling one-bedrooms for her and Tom and studios for me.

  They went to see a dozen places over the next two days and were ready to fork over their life savings to sublet from a guy in Logan Square who wanted to get out of his place on Labor Day weekend, but I kept holding out.

  Much to Regan’s delight, Saturday night Johnny took us to a dive bar he knew of where ID wasn’t an issue. We claimed a booth by the window and I nursed my beer and stared through the smudged pane, watching cars circle the block, drivers seeking an elusive parking spot. Across the table from me, Regan’s excitement level rose with every shot of tequila she took. After the third, she and Johnny double-teamed me. “Are we going to do this or not, Emily? Where are you going to live?” she demanded.

  I shrugged.

  Beside me, Johnny’s floppy red spikes swayed as he preached at me like a minister on Sunday morning. “How many venues does Chicago have? How many labels is it home to? Carlisle has one and zero, respectively. They get that.” He jerked his chin at Tom and Regan. “Why don’t you? You know you aren’t going to be content waiting tables in a farm town and playing gigs on the weekend. You want to be a rock star.”

  “No, Mr. Ambition.” I glared into Johnny’s pompous gray eyes. “You want to be a rock star. I want to be a musician.”

  “Oh, are you calling me a sellout again?” He playfully stuck out his lower lip and crossed his tattooed forearms over his chest.

  We’d debated this often. Truthfully, we both wanted to be rock stars. The difference was that Johnny took a business-oriented approach to stardom, hustling to get meetings with the right people, whereas I chose to let the music bring them to me. On his second visit to Carlisle to see us, I told Johnny straight up that She Laughs could do that because we had a unique sound. Johnny had talent, but his band wasn’t bringing anything new to the table. The world didn’t need another guy who alternated between screaming at and whining to the chick who wronged him, even if the record execs kept shelling out money for those bands. Johnny had looked for a second like he wanted to punch me, but then he kissed me instead.

  That was our way of flirting: he brought the M-80s, I brought the gasoline, and we both carried matches in our back pocket. We got a bigger charge out of bickering than holding hands.

  But at the moment, I wasn’t flirting. I was making a major life decision, and he didn’t get it.

  “Listen,” I snarled, swallowing the rest of my warm beer. “Just because you’ve been up to Carlisle to see me a few times and we’ve spent the last couple nights crammed like sardines in that box you call an apartment doesn’t mean you know me. Regan does, but apparently she’s gotten so caught up in the excitement that she’s forgotten.” Regan’s expression sobered and she started twisting her magenta hair nervously around her finger. “Her parents have each other. Tom’s been trying to escape his mother since he left the womb …”

  Tom’s brown eyes darted to the scuffed wooden table; he hated being involved in arguments.

  Johnny’s palm fell across mine. “But all you and your dad have is each other.”

  Every muscle in my body stiffened except for my right hand, which bucked like an untamed horse to dislodge Johnny’s. That had been exactly my point, but he wasn’t allowed to say it. Pseudo rock-god boys didn’t get access to my emotions even if they did have decent musical chops and could teach me a thing or two about the biz.

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” I lied. “You guys just got me so worked up … Listen, the real issue is money. Even with everything I’ve saved from my crappy waitress job, I can’t afford to live alone in Chicago. Case closed.”

  “Em!” Regan slammed her beer bottle on the table.

  “So live with me,” Johnny said calmly.

  My head swiveled slowly, a look of abject horror plastered across my face as I met his nonchalant smirk. “I don’t even like you!” I protested. That wasn’t really true, but for some reason it came out ahead of my other reasons, like “I’ve only known you for a month,” and “Your apartment is smaller than my bedroom.”

  Johnny didn’t flinch; he’d gotten used to matching me gibe for gibe. “How come you keep making out with me, then?”

  I tossed my hands in the air, flailing them in Regan’s direction. “Tell him I have a bad habit of sleeping with boys in punk bands.”

  Clearly as thrown by Johnny’s suggestion as I was, Regan’s eyes jumped back and forth from me to him. She finally said, “You used to have a bad habit. I don’t know what the hell this is. But I do know it’s time to get out of Carlisle.”

  When I arrived home late Sunday night, I found my da
d parked at the kitchen table, ready to greet me the moment I walked through the back door. Normally, he waited up for me while lounging on the couch, where he could comfortably read a book and listen to a record. It was like he knew something was up.

  His eyes drilled into me as I propped my guitar case against the wall. “Gig go well?” he asked.

  I pulled out the chair across from him. “Yeah, it did. In fact, it sold out.” I didn’t scoot the chair all the way into the table. I needed to distance myself from him in every way in order to give the speech I’d been rehearsing the entire three-hour drive home. I’d come up with some metaphor about the Chicago music scene being my version of college and … Crap. As soon as I glanced up and caught a glimpse of Dad’s encouraging grin, I forgot the whole speech.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I knew he meant the show, but instead I blurted out, “Regan and Tom got an apartment in Chicago. They want to move next weekend.”

  His smile crashed into a frown. His gleaming brown eyes got muddy and the lines around them became more defined as he blinked back tears. “I always knew you’d leave and probably end up there. But so soon?”

  “Opportunities … ,” I murmured. I battled with the need to comfort him. If I hugged him, I’d start crying and take it all back. When a tear of his own slipped free and his hand flew up to hide it, I couldn’t fight it anymore. I jumped up from my seat and pulled him into my arms. I wept, too, harder than he did, so that soon he was smoothing my long hair, consoling me.

  “I’ll visit all the time,” I blubbered. “And when I get a place, you’ll visit me, too. I’ll find one soon. I don’t want to stay with Johnny long.”